Mike Blumenthal

On July 22, my client Barbara Oliver & Co. Jewelry’s Google Place page was hit with what appears to be a competitor spam review. The review is rather bizarre with racial innuendo and unfounded accusations. It would appear that the reviewer had not ever visited the store. The timing of the spam review is interesting. There have …

Google has been in a pitched tussle with Yelp for quite some time. Google introduced reviews to local in 2007 and the fun began. Yelp reviews in Google, Yelp reviews out of Google, Yelp’s anger at Google’s use of their content, Google contrition, a large offer by Google and a failed buyout, Yelp reviews out of …

Google Places has once again “mixed it up” in the review arena. They are no longer showing the count for 3rd party reviews on the main search page and they are only displaying the count for Google reviews. They are still showing the link to the main 3rd party review sites on the main search results …

The review world is full of contradictions. Many review sites, TripAdvisor included, have strong penalties if a business is caught incenting reviews. The prohibition makes sense in that an incentive is likely to lead a reviewer to generate a low quality, less than thoughtful review in order to receive the incentive. There is also the …

It appears that Google has removed most but not all review spam from the Moishe’s Moving System’s Places page and from many of the other Places pages affected by this scam. On Moishe’s Places page, the spam that remains (besides their response spam) was posted between July 1 and July 3 and seems to still …

Most small businesses live in dread of the day when a competitor drops a nasty review on their Places page. Imagine waking up one day and finding 58 of them. That’s what happened to the Place Page for Moishe’s Moving Systems in NYC. For several days in early July they were finding one 1 star …

Today, I am presenting at the seventh GetListed.org Local University in Grand Rapids, MI. in cooperation with Mlive.com and the Grand Rapids Press, Muskegon Chronicle, the Kalamazoo Gazette and the Grand Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce. I hope to personally meet all of you in attendance. Please don’t hesitate to reach out and ask any questions that …

Sometime over this past weekend Google stopped showing any review snippet with either Blended or the Branded One Box Results in the main search results view for many results. It appears that snippets are still visible in restaurants, hotels and possibly other heavily reviewed areas New view (from 6/27): View from last week (taken 6/23) …

  It was apparent to me in early January that the introduction of Google Hotpot was leading to vast increase in Google’s review/rating corpus. I was seeing reviews and ratings in industries and geographic areas that had not seen Google originated reviews and seeing them frequently. To get a better handle on this trend I …